There are about 200 accents in England. There is one which marks the speaker as cultured (Received Pronunciation), and 199 which mark the speaker as a lesser being to one extent or another. And some of them are just the worst. Those are the creatures which inhabit the package tours to Greece and Spain, punching people, fucking in the street, and vomiting everywhere.

There's a rather terrible Navy-based drama called "The Last Ship" which just finished up its second season on TNT and the BitTorrent sites. It features the lovely Rhona Mitra as the English heroine, with her RP accent, and these two "British sailors", the Ramsey brothers, who inherit their Royal Navy submarine when everyone else on it dies. The actor playing the antagonist is Irish, but his "English" accent is ridiculously low-class. Maybe it's deliberate, but that would have been a terrible choice because Royal Navy officers are virtually all drawn from the so-called public school class which cultivates the RP accent.

But it's pretty clear that Rhona Mitra's RP accent shows us she's smart and virtuous, and the Irish guy's ersatz Cockney is supposed to show us he's bad.